Asher Jay: Art of the Matter

Asher Jay: Art of the Matter

From blood ivory to big cats, creative conservationist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Asher Jay is on a mission to protect the world's wildlife the best way she knows how—through her art.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Asher Jay: For me it's about how can I get people to feel that effortless connection to nature. Technically speaking this is all part of our biological and evolutionary development. This is our story. No matter what we do to the world life still finds a way to express itself. That is pure magic to me. That is nature finding expression against all the odds that we impress upon it. That, to me, is hope.

People often ask me if I find it to be a bit of a contradiction, being such an impassioned advocate for wilderness and wildlife, yet choosing to reside in the most curated habitat for man, New York City. And I often reply to them, 'Not particularly so' because, while I can understand that living in a city easily allows people to disengage themselves from the realities of the world around them, I think it is the very same city that has helped me find this intrinsic connection, no matter how far removed I am from nature, to nature.

So when I walk home from the gym on a fine Friday evening through Madison Square Park, the smallest patch of green in New York, and I encounter fireflies flitting about at dusk, that is pure magic to me. That is nature, finding expression against all the odds that we impress upon it. That to me is hope. And that shows me that life is resilient which inspires me to do what I do.

So, when the BP oil-spill happened, I felt compelled to participate, to take the dialogue a step further than just feeling like this passive voice in a much larger system. Because an individual does have impact, granted that it is... you know, a small drop in the ocean but every drop counts, and I think together we build up a much larger momentum. And when the BP oil-spill happened, at that point I was at the peak of my fashion career. So, I had just launched a label, I wanted to take that the next step forward, but then when this unfolded I was just completely debilitated. I was in my bed sobbing for about a month and I realized that I couldn't just go on with my life turning a blind eye to what was happening in my immediate reality and just being a victim to what seemed at that time a failing system. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's a failing system but I feel like I have a much larger voice and stake in what is happening around me simply on account of taking responsibility.

And this particular work, along with six others that I created, cast light on how we fuel life with death. And it was a way for me to condense information and package it into the simplest format possible. Something that is two dimensional, contrast positive space with negative space, which is to say, you know, what remains, what's worth protecting and what has been lost forever. Because unless you show people what is there against what isn't, there is no contrast, there's no understanding of the baseline that has shifted, which seems the constant problem with the generation today. They just don't know that we have lost so much in the last 10 years, in the last 20 years.

And when I created these works I decided to take that leap of faith, which led me to Africa, and I spent the entire two months that we were there basically on a one-woman crusade picking up garbage everywhere I went. And I would drop it off at different ranger posts every evening. You do this for a week and word travels, because the next thing I knew when I was shifting from one resort to the next, people would call ahead and tell them, like, 'She is going to come and inspect your sewage plan, how you dispose of your waste. And she is going to take issue with everything, so be prepared, she's coming over.' And so they would welcome me and show me... And they'd be, like, 'This is what you need to see' and I'm like, 'No, I'm going to do it on my terms and I will see what I want to see when I want to see it.' But it is just the idea of one person having that voice and that travelling within two months across the board in Tanzania and Kenya. So much so, people thought I was the part of UN by then, that I was with-- affiliated with numerous other organizations, that I was in on this, like, insider conspiracy bust, and what that culminated in was me coming back to New York with a whole lot of garbage, which was a really interesting conversation with TSA.

And I wound up, you know, clearing immigration somehow and wound up in New York and I used all this garbage to create a line of artwork called 'Shadowed Heirlooms'. And the entire series focused on how infrastructure growth and population growth was infringing upon wild habitat, and how all of the trees that I saw, the open grasslands that we think of when we think of the dark continent and the lost wilderness of Africa, is completely bestrewn and bejeweled with plastic bags and consumers brand packaging from European and American markets. So I would see L'Oreal, I'd see Tampax, I'd see diaper bags, cosmetic companies... Things that you would recognize from here in Africa, in the open grassland. And zebras and giraffes chewing on this. And that's not what you think of when you think of Africa and that was such a shame and it really broke my heart.

And so I created this line of work which led me to meet Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry shortly after, like I said, the path of least resistance, and that opened up a whole different dialogue which was all about oceans and what was happening to cetaceans being exploited for a spectacle, so this whole idea of not just capturing dolphins and orcas to show them in these confined spaces where they are held for long periods of time, completely abused and out of context because they have a large social context, these are highly sentient beings, they know how to relate on a, like, a deep emotional level and they live in a culture, sort of as how humans do. And to pull them out of that whole context and show them as one off is not-- is to take away the very essence and spirit of that animal, is to break that spirit. And so they're just shadows of what cetaceans would be in the wild in captivity. So when you go to SeaWorld and you support that show, you are not getting any kind of education. All you are seeing is an orca that is not an orca any more, that has been completely broken in every form that's possible, psychologically traumatized. And you are paying a dollar for that and that's not okay. And if we don't condone slavery, and we don't condone this sort of abuse in human beings, we shouldn't being doing that for other species.

So I decided to get involved with this whole campaign and created a series of works and once again trying to condense and fold information into two-dimensional layouts that will immediately translate in a glimpse to largest audience possible. So this was as simple as interpreting what the Japanese flag would look like by placing sort of a bloody spot that's bleeding out in the center of the flag. And that also spells the word 'The Cove'.

And not only did I see garbage unfolding in Africa but every time I went scuba diving or snorkeling in any ecosystem, all I encountered was plastic. So I started creating these simple animations, this is the other aspect of my career, that I haven't told very many people, is that I don't know how to do half of the things I do. And so when I wake up, thank God for Google and thank God for, like, 'How To For Dummies' because if I didn't, like, look up these, like, simple tutorials there would be no way in which I even knew how to animate. So this particular animation is one of my early animations, just to connect consumer choices and a simple thing such as acquiring a plastic bag in your life and how that translates into affecting a larger ecosystem in our world.

And so as I was saying earlier with life being resilient, I mean-- And this is the other thing I have to say about my life is that most of the mail I get is just garbage and the one thing that I got recently is a plastic bottle from Long Island that was covered in barnacles. So this is once again a sign of life being resilient. So, no matter what we do to the world, life still finds a way to express itself. All we need to do is give it a chance. So, for me it's about how can I get people to feel that effortless connection to nature. And one of the things that I did is starting to embed data that is otherwise hard for a layperson to feel a visceral connection with, through what I can create. And this particular image is a time-face because it shows you a boat at every hour, which shows you that exploitation occurs around the clock, day and night. But also the fact that there is pie chart embedded within it through dotted black lines and only three percent of global fisheries is in recovery. The rest of it is either moderately exploited, heavily exploited or just going extinct, on the brink of extinction. That is not okay, especially when over one billion people in the world rely on fish as a protein source.

And this particular image just shows you what's wrong with this picture. All of the life that is in the ocean is actually on land. Taking it a step further, getting people to connect with the idea of barcodes. You know, the fact that we slap on a barcode onto any living creature and then selling it. We sell everything we can get our hands on. And we say that-- We somehow single out China and say that China is the one who is doing this. It's not one nation, it's not one type of people, we all do it.

So, the other work that I started creating, the other line of work I started creating, is along the lines of climate change. Because habitat loss and the fact that weather patterns are shifting locally is resulting in species migrating early and not having the food supply they need to nourish themselves so they can go to the next stop. So it's like, along the way, the entire chain gets broken. And this particular work is about how climate can march for itself, if it could, but since it can't, we need to take a stand for it. And, Climate March is not just about climate. It's about biodiversity loss and decline of wildlife in wilderness areas around the world. And so rising sea levels is not just a threat to us, it's the threat to every type of organism, things that we have not even discovered yet. There are five species up top in the exclamation marks because they are recent discoveries. And beneath that is all the species we have known of that are in question, heading towards the brink of extinction. And in the last row you have species that have been driven to extinction in the last five years, including the Western Black Rhinoceros and the Javan Tiger. And this is the same fate that faces all the other megafauna in question.

So then I decided to take the opportunity that was given to me to create a Fabergé egg, for the Big Egg Hunt to speak to these issues. and I created this particular image called the 'iStorm Egg', which shows you a Sandy hurricane satellite image. It's the eye of the storm. And on top of that I've overlaid biodiversity, eyes of biodiversity from around the world, including human beings. So you see all these eyes staring back at you, they are silent witnesses to what's happening to their habitat, to the world around them. And this particular egg, I'm actually going to build on it further. Because one of the things I think that's lacking is that we think 'It's going to be okay.' That somehow we are going to get through this, technology will come up with an answer. There's some shortcut that we are going to hit. There isn't going to be any. And unless we understand that this distant cataclysmic future is a closer reality, something that's palpable in the immediate future, we are never going to really get down to doing something about it.

So, one of the ideas we're bouncing around with a whole bunch of people is this idea of creating a black box, a sensory depravation chamber. And within the black box I'm going to place this egg and have an immersive soundtrack that is going to basically be different audio channels of wild calls. And the closer a person gets to the egg, the more those wild calls will start diminishing. And then you'll have that being replaced by anthropogenic noise. And there's going to be a tipping point in place, so when there's enough anthropogenic noise replacing the audio channels of wild calls, it's going to trigger a hurricane. So you realize that it's your interaction with that egg that's resulting in that hurricane. And the other aspect of this is also going to be that there's going to be a video installation along the walls. So I'm going to place an entire track of eyes opening and closing from around the world. And those too will go... dark as we get closer to the egg and as you're triggering the hurricane. Ultimately resulting in a completely black chamber devoid of sound, devoid of life. And that's what we are resulting in. So, I think if you are in that space, for even a moment, you are going to realize that that dead-zone was created by you, and that's the kind of dead-zone you are perpetuating in the world around you.

So, that has led me because-- since I don't say no to any of the issues, it keeps leading me further down the rabbit hole. And this stumble has led me to the Denver Ivory Crush, which the whole intent behind it was to 'destroy' the stockpile. And I put that within quotes because that's not what has happened, eventually. They recently announced a design challenge, a call to artists and designers to create something out of this crushed ivory. And many people, including me, back when I went to it, I thought when they were going to crush the ivory, that it was going to be completely powdered, like-- like utterly destroyed. And that's not what happened. You have giant shards of ivory that can still be used for something. So anything that's cast out of this material is still going to look beautiful, even though they say it's 'educational', which by the way is going to be the next big loophole that Asian markets are going to exploit. 'Educational use of ivory.' I mean, how are you going to define that in other markets? It's hard enough to regulate this illicit trade, a trade that basically allows for death to perpetrate en masse. 50,000 elephants culled a year for this particular product that is not even really needed in any capacity by human beings. It doesn't-- It's not integral to our survival.

And the other thing with that is the ban and the moratorium. When you have a moratorium in place, all it says is the market is closed for now and the doors will open eventually. So, the prices will build in the meanwhile. And you can just hold on to your stockpile and release it when the time is right. And with a ban, it says, You made a ( bleep ) investment, this is over. Get over yourself' And it's done. You know, we are not going to kill any more elephants for this ridiculous trade. Right now, the trade, what it's doing is infringing upon not only their habitat but also killing the individuals that are part-- An integral part of a functioning society of elephants. So, that results in a loss of information being handed down from generation to generation. So all you are looking at when you look at a herd when you go on safari now is sub-adults and their calves. It's like looking at teenage mothers with kids and they don't know what to do with them. And that's not an 'elephant' society, that's not an elephant herd as it used to be 50 years ago or 100 years ago. So when people come up to me and say, you know, 'What do I do with the piece of ivory that I have in my house? A belt-buckle or a statue, you know, it's like the entire fur argument. If you don't destroy it, you have it in your house in any capacity, whether it's pre-moratorium or post-moratorium, it doesn't matter. Because ultimately what you're doing is saying that it's okay to have ivory in some way. That it's okay to encourage the death of an elephant for this. And that's not okay. Because when you wear fur from the past, you are saying it's okay to scale up demand in the present for that product. A product that is not integral to our survival.

And so with the Ivory Crush now I'm trying to suggest that we cremate the crushed raw material and use the cremated material to cast a memorial instead of creating a sculpture of any sort. Because with a memorial at least you have a space where people could come to, to mourn loss as opposed to just looking at something that's beautiful and supposedly educational. And, it's like how do you use the right vocabulary to reach a new demographic, because there's no point preaching to the choir. And for that you need to figure out how you package your information and what you're trying to say through it.

So, this particular work... it's a peek-preview, it's not released yet. And I started working with Dereck and Beverly Joubert, who are Explorers-in-Residence here, to cast a light on what's happening to rhinos in Kruger National Park, which is a high poaching incidence area. And we are trying to currently translocate 100 Rhinos from Kruger to Botswana. And so this particular animation is going to cast a light on how we can go about, you know, funding and helping their efforts on the fields. So reinterpreting the rhino out of the I/O icon reaches engineers. Like my roommate's boyfriend who came into the room, for the first time in his life was suddenly awakened and, like, was actively engaged by what was happening to rhinos for the first time. He's asking me information about what was happening to rhinos in Kruger National Park.

With this particular image I tried to get the cat to stare back, to connect to the audience member, to the viewer. It's about extending what the cat can do for itself because its voice-- It has a voice. They're not voiceless, it's just that we're not listening. And with big cats in specific, it has become a recent passion of mine simply because of the way in which we have allowed for lot things to happen with them. And now this model is being suggested as a replicable model for rhinos and other species. To farm tigers is not okay. To farm any wildlife is not okay. And we are just standing by, as China continues to have tiger farms upon tiger farms. Thailand. Vietnam. And they have 5,000 tigers in captivity right now. And they are kept in appalling conditions. Like sardines in a can.

So, this particular trade for tiger bone wine and tiger bone cake has become a recent focus of mine. Simply because it's not just about tigers, they're also harvesting lions in Africa for the bone trade. And neither of these things have any medicinal value, has any kind of value for the human being. And, honestly speaking, every single thing that we create can have a synthetic version, that is generated in a lab, because we're capable of innovation so it's really discrediting us and our ability to be the 'intelligent' species. We're not being intelligent at all. And every tiger is perfect. It has to be. Because it's the only way that it's going to function in the ecosystem it was born for. To predate and do what a tiger can, only a tiger can do. And so to take that away from a tiger, by replacing the stripes with bars and placing it behind those bars is to break the very essence of a tiger just as we broke the essence of an orca by placing it within a tank.

And to take that a step further, talking about how species connect to the land and how they sculpt and change the fabric of that land. And how that land ties back into the essence and core of a tiger. It's back and forth. There is a give and take in that relationship, which we don't understand at all. So we think we can play, sort of, God for the entire context, right? We can pull things out, put things in, shoot things down. It's all good, it will recover, it will figure itself out because we know best. But we don't know anything. And we don't have the humility to acknowledge that. So this particular work once again cast a light on, sort of, how the ecosystem, the Savannah, the grassland is an implicit part of a lion's soul. Soul is a very tricky term to use because it has religious connotations but like there is a larger sense of self and being within an animal that should be acknowledged.

And tying that back into the idea of, you know, are we willing to be clear in our communication about how we grant certain rights and personhood to ourselves, even to our corporations, but not willing to extend that towards animals. We keep them in vertical bars, in vertical stripes, but we keep horizontal stripes and freedom for ourselves. And why is that? Why do we have this bifurcated view of how we associate with our own selves? Because, technically speaking, this is all part of our biological and evolutionary development, this is our story. And we're just fragmenting parts of our selves and saying that we can't afford those rights and extend those rights to other beings. And that's just incomplete as a picture.

So these images again show that we've taken the voice away from wildlife but we managed to take a stand for ourselves. So everything happens in relation to us. And currently there is a court case going on to basically cast a light on the need to impart rights to animals. At least to certain animals that have been proved to have higher cognitive function. So, cetaceans, elephants and great apes. So this is about giving equality to both man and ape. And the reason why I did it in blue and red is for the Republican and Democratic vote. And the image to the other side is called 'Deep Rooted Truths'. Because it connects us to the tree of life and also to the DNA, the helix, that shows our evolution and how we connect to nature on, sort of, an inherent cellular level. And that we are in balance with a much larger system, if we choose to be.

And this particular image, I actually created as part of this same series. You will notice the same colors, you know, trickling through and trickling across. And the reason why I created this was because I went on a dive in Isla Mujeres and I saw 'Silent Evolution', which is an artwork of sculptures that have been dropped into the ocean and the bio-rock allows for corals to grow on it. And I love the way in which life found expression again on a human form and extended from the human form and reached back into its ecosystem. And interacted with other species. So I found this way of showing that we're all made of the same stuff and that we all flow in and out of one another, if only we were awake for it. And tying that further into the cladogram, so it's, sort of, our lineage and our larger story. So this is where we come from. This is who we are. And if it was a part of our past, it should be part of our present and future. And so by granting these rights to wild, what we're doing is acknowledging who we really are. And granting those rights in its entirety to ourselves.

In the end I think the reason why I do everything that I do is because I want to influence the one thing that I know will have impact on nature and the fate of nature going forward. And that's you. So if you don't hold yourselves accountable and you don't plug yourselves into this dialogue, there is no hope. You can have numerous people, coming up here and giving these speeches, but that doesn't translate into anything, unless you yourself get involved. And stop part-timing conservation. Thank you.

Asher Jay: Art of the Matter

From blood ivory to big cats, creative conservationist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Asher Jay is on a mission to protect the world's wildlife the best way she knows how—through her art.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.